The session "Old English Literature, Including Beowulf" is still accepting abstracts in July for the 2018 PAMLA conference, which will be held from November 9-11 at Western Washington University. This call is a deadline extension, so please submit abstracts soon if you are interested. Papers can explore any Old English texts, not just Beowulf.

A growing body of recent scholarship argues that the Haitian Revolution is one of the defining events of modernity. But from 1791 until 1804, the fog of war distorted and obscured Western perceptions of Haiti. From independence until official recognition by France in 1825, isolation did likewise. Fear, mythmaking, and bigotry filled the void. In Tropics of Haiti, Marlene Daut states that “[a] great portion of the texts within the transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution reveal themselves, upon closer examination, to be unsure about what they ‘think’ they are: novels or memoirs, histories or dramatizations… [they] blur the lines between history and fiction, biography and memoir, philosophy and science”.

“An adaptation is not vampiric: it does not draw the life-blood from its source and leave it dying or dead, nor is it paler than the adapted work. It may, on the contrary, keep that prior work alive, giving it an afterlife it would never have had otherwise” (Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2006).

In the last decades, the general perception that emotions are opposed to history and that politics is unemotional has been challenged by a number of scholars in various disciplines: Sara Ahmed’s, for example, has argued that emotions ‘stick’ to objects in a social context, while others consider affect as a fundamental aspect of citizenship (among them, Graziella Parati). This panel seeks to continue a conversation started at NeMLA 2018 about the role and representation of emotions and affect in Italian history and literature. We will accept proposals that analyze the intersectionality between history, identity and emotions from early modern to contemporary Italian literary texts.

Warriors in medieval epic and chivalric romance often seem to return whole from battle even if they lose body parts or family members. They grieve deeply and vocally on the battlefield and then return to their homes or cities, seemingly ready to continue battle in the name of lost kin. Charlemagne is devastated by pain over Roland’s death in Roncevaux, demonstrated with tears and swooning. Others, like William “Short-Nose” of Orange, become famous for their lost parts, which, in absence, may even become emblematic of such warrior heroes. But do these warriors exhibit symptoms of trauma stemming from their constant exposure to violence?

The scholarship on early modern women has moved far beyond the long-held notion that women remained in the home. Indeed, mobility was a defining feature of many women’s lives. For this forum, we are interested not only in examples of women’s mobility, but also research that interrogates the far-reaching implications of that mobility for women and considers how it informs our understanding of gender in the early modern world.

William Hogarth’s engravings invite us to view the streets, parlors, insane asylums, prisons and gambling houses of 18th-century London. Through his “modern moral subjects,” his satirical eye exposed hypocrisy, aristocratic excess and overwrought devotion to foreign artists. His influence can be seen in political cartoons, graphic novels and even cinema. This panel will discuss Hogarth’s place in 21st century culture. During this time that seems desperately to need keen, perspicacious satire, can we turn to Hogarth as a paragon? What can an artist so inextricably linked to 18th-century life teach us about ourselves?

The 20th century is characterized by the sheer and fast-paced growth of human exchanges that, related to and flexibly caused by the increase of mobility, travel, migration and wars, affected the cosmopolitanism and hybridity of many writers. The often-difficult systematization of nationhood and the process of decolonization further contributed to the reconfiguration of social, political, religious, and cultural geographies whose boundaries were troubled by dynamics of trespassing. Italy plays an overlooked but significant part in the process of cultural displacement and aesthetic redistribution that characterizes the 20th century.

From Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg” to Rosie Bradiotti’s “Vitruvian woman,” posthuman studies and feminist studies have both used images of the female body as tangible metaphors in order to disrupt and critique boundaries and binaries. This roundtable will explore 20th and 21st century literature that illuminates the entanglement and correspondence between posthuman and feminist discourses, specifically in the notion of the female or post-gender body.

Papers for this roundtable are invited to reflect the following questions through literary readings:

Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamozov declares, “Without God, everything is permitted.” This notion is philosophically provocative and existentially potent, particularly in the study of secular literature from the modern era. Having experienced with Hillis Miller calls “the disappearance of God” or Nietzsche’s “death of God”, secular literature shows several attempts to account for humanity’s place, meaning, and immanent values. This panel seeks to explore questions of existential crisis in the secular age that perforate throughout modern literature and theory. How does one ascribe meaning or purpose to a world of violence, trauma, and suffering? How does modern fiction tease out social problems and what insight to they provide for them?

The economic realities facing today’s undergraduate population have led to a proliferation of enrollments into PhD programs. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of these neophyte graduate students are waiting for jobs that are either no longer available or never existed in the first place. Concurrently, for right or wrong, in US colleges and universities at all levels, adjunct and contingent faculty members are no longer in the minority. These part-time and non-tenure track (NTT) instructors outnumber their tenured and tenure-track counterparts at many two-year and four-year institutions.

Founded in 2016 in Amsterdam, the Memory Studies Association (MSA) aims to provide a central forum for developing, discussing, and exchanging ideas about the theory and methodology of the broad-ranging field of memory studies. The MSA welcomes all students, scholars, and practitioners interested in memory in both the public and private realms, no matter their home discipline, to come together to help advance the field and exchange work and ideas.

SAMLA is again pleased to offer prospective participants the opportunity to submit abstracts to a General Call for Papers. The General Call for Papers will be used to build programming from accepted abstracts that did not resonate with any of our currently published CFPs.